Although verbally and recognizably there is some small list of common emotions and sentiments, experience is vastly multi-faceted. Innumerable aspects, barely distinct, course through each other and breed others, utterly defying any thin scheme, logical system, or dictionary of kinds. Experience is not just packaged units. The seeming units—experiences, emotions, perceptions, ideas, feelings—which seem to stand still and stable always also involve a myriad flux. We will develop some ways to think about this myriad, hopefully so successfully that the question will then turn about and, if anything, we will be puzzled at how there can be something seemingly stable, recognizable, and universal. How is it, for example, that, with the myriad facets of any moment and the vast variety of what may make us angry in each different situation, when we lose our temper the stomping, hitting, or kicking of anger is always the same? Or is it? We must ask about both the myriad and the stable.

What is anger? I find it enormously strange that I, a psychiatrist, must seriously pose such a question in this day and age and I think it is virtually astounding that the answers are not only slow in coming but are embedded in a morass of confused definitions, misconceptions, and simplistic theories. Problems of violence, destructiveness, and hate are so much with us and there seems a crying need for clarification and understanding of these phenomena and any phenomena related to them. Anger, particularly, is of crucial importance in psychiatry where it is an everyday focus of attention in our patients, whether we do clinical evaluations alone, pass out drugs, or discuss, evaluate, and analyze in psychotherapy. Yet, there has been almost no attention paid to the phenomenon of anger in psychiatric and psychological literature. When it is mentioned at all, anger is subsumed under some general category such as aggression or affect and little consideration is given to the assumptions underlying such categorization.

Faced with the peculiar question, “What is a film?” or “What is the nature of cinema?” the most obvious starting point may well be the most obvious fact about film: a film is something that we see. Things seen are, necessarily, spatial. But reasonable as it seems to insist then that a film must be a spatial object, one cannot stop there. For while other spatial objects merely occupy a position within space accessible to our vision, a film also provides its own space to replace that of our normal visual field. My concern here is to describe clearly this peculiar space that cinema presents for our experience—what I call cinema space.

Philosophers interested in Heidegger’s thought and those interested in the nature of consciousness seem to have assumed that their areas of interest are mutually exclusive. Heidegger clearly is not doing philosophy of mind in any of his works. He does not even make constructive use of the term consciousness in Being and Time, much less in his reflections on thinking and language. He wants to avoid giving primacy to discursive understanding as well as to the self with regard to both existence and thought. But his way of understanding existing and thinking appears to me to be helpful when one wants to understand the existential immediacy of consciousness, that is, when one attempts to articulate the insight that consciousness is a state of human being which transcends the particular intentions of the self. This problem area is not new. Leibniz, for example, spoke of the essence of substance in terms of a type of urgency or Drang toward the realization of that order which each monad embodied. Kant puzzled over the mind’s unavoidable “interest” in rational unity, an interest which appeared to him, albeit faintly, to be immediate to the rational act. He further speculated on the felt power of reason’s ethical nature. One is under a categorical demand intrinsic to reason, such that he suffers self-disunity or a sense of inner unworthiness—I think that we would say guilt today—if he acts contrary to those demands. There are many other examples which point to the possibility that some dimensions of consciousness may be understood with reference to the inevitable drift or felt teleology of one’s state. Usually, however, one finds the suggestion that man is deeply inclined toward some type of self-actualization without finding that suggestion carefully developed.

André Breton and Phillipe Soupault used to spend afternoons popping in and out of movie houses in Paris, seeing a bit of this film, a bit of that, refusing to observe the names of the films, or remember their plots. Max Ernst defined his surrealist art as “the fortuitous encounter upon a non-suitable plane of two distant realities”; and suggests that in this way “we have already broken loose from the law of identity.” Breton, again, in the Second Manifesto announces: “Everything tends to make us believe there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low cease to be perceived as contradictions.”

Recent ethical theory shows a retreat from the emotivism of the first half of the century. Philosophers are pretty well agreed that evaluative statements are not simple ejaculations; most ascribe to them some kind of logic, and some even call them identical, in important respects, to statements of fact. Moore’s proof, that evaluative terms cannot be analyzed in terms of descriptive predicates, has not prevented philosophers like R. M. Hare from pointing out significant respects in which their use is governed by descriptive meaning rules.